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The Catchables?

Are football and fishing interlinked? You bet they are ask Ben Jailler

I’ve been a Gooner for far longer than I’ve been a fly fisherman and it was to Arsenal’s 2003/04 unbeaten season that my mind turned during a recent run of impossibly bad luck. Although for me, it was less a case of Invicibles and more a case of the trout proving to be uncatchable, as I hooked and lost nine fish in a row.

My Uncatchables sequence started at the end of May on a small stillwater in the South Wiltshire village of Horton. A friend from work was housesitting a farm which was the location of a notorious murder and attempted murder in 1970s when farmer Graham Backhouse blew up his wife with a homemade car bomb and stabbed to death his neighbour, Colyn Bedale-Taylor.

Finding myself and my six-year-old daughter at a loose end during May half-term, I wrangled a ride for her on one of the ponies at the farm’s livery and a few hours fishing for me on the aforementioned lake. While Ella bonded with Maddie, I headed for the lake with my friend’s other half, Gary, a talented local artist and relative newbie to fly fishing.

It was an overcast day and I wasn’t overly concerned by the wind gusting to 20mph. The lake, which resembles a Christmas stocking hanging from a mantelpiece, fits snugly in a narrow valley, surrounded on three sides by steep sloping hills with a dam forming the cuff of the sock.

The lake was small (about half an acre), overstocked and success, so I thought, was guaranteed. I saw this as an opportunity to try out some Damsel patterns I’d recently tied and the thought that I might actually have to work to catch a fish, never crossed my mind. So it was in a confident mood that I strung up my beloved Loop Opti 5WT and attached a Damsel with a thorax of yellow glister to the end of a 12 foot leader.

It was actually Gary that caught first and it wasn’t until I speeded up my retrieve that I connected with a lively trout which threw the hook following the second of two spectacular leaps. A change to a Blue Flash Damsel resulted in my second hook-up of the session and after a solid scrap, I lost it as the net beckoned.

Neither of the takes could be classed as fully-committed, so I was relieved, having switched to the opposite side of the lake, to have a trout absolutely nail the same fly and tear off across the water. Unfortunately, it wrapped itself around the branches of a willow tree and became stuck fast, leaving me with no option but to pull on the fly line until the leader snapped

With five minutes left before I had to pick up Ella and fish rising out in the middle, I switched to a Fiery Brown Shipman’s. First cast it was hit by fish number four rising from the depths, only to again slip the hook as I searched in vain for somewhere to land it beyond the wall of bulrushes in front of me.

Writing off my experience as nothing more than a healthy dose of hubris dispatched by the angling Gods, I was back on more familiar territory a few days later. Following a very disappointing 2015 season at Bristol Water’s Barrow Tanks, I’d joined the Mallard Fly Fishers syndicate which leases Mallard Lake off the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust.

The 22 acre Mallard Lake is a site of special scientific interest because of its rare water plants, including Chara, which grow on the lake bed. Bank fishing is restricted to the south and east banks. Two boats are available, but due to the lake being designated as a site of special scientific interest, the boats have to be secured to one of the five buoys located around the lake while fishing. Reaching nine foot at its deepest, it’s a relatively shallow lake and, being a former gravel pit, the water is crystal clear.

Having struggled through the famines of last season at The Barrows, it was now a time of feast at Mallard Lake. For me, I’m usually quite content with a brace, four fish is exceptional and maybe once a season I’ll have one of those sessions where the planets are aligned, the angling gods are smiling and, more through luck than design, boots are duly filled. So far at Mallard I’d been averaging around four fish a session. From March to May the boats had out-fished the bank and April’s buzzer fishing had been spectacular, with fish smashing my imitations with some of the most savage takes I’d ever experienced.

As May turned to June, the action returned to the bank as the Mayfly and Damsel hatches began in earnest. Slow on the uptake as ever, on this particular evening I found myself in the green boat, moored at buoy number two in a flat calm. The session’s solitary rise came to my trusty Fiery Brown Shipman’s, which was quickly followed by a parting of ways as I pulled in my line at the same time as the rainbow trout made a dash for freedom. Redemption appeared in the final hour before darkness as the sedge hatched and my boat was surrounded by the dimples of rising trout. However, I could not buy a take and rowed dejectedly back to the shore.

It was after that evening that the thought of my Uncatchables began to take root in my mind. I even started naming each lost fish after a member of the Invincibles line-up: Lehman, Cole, Lauren, Toure and Campbell accounted for the first five; Gilberto and Viera came four days later - the briefest Brazilian Samba with a Blue Flash Damsel and ‘la grande saucisse’ lost at the net as I again struggled to find somewhere safe to land the fish. Lungberg was as heartbreaking as the Champions League Quarter Final loss to Chelsea when a poorly tied knot saw him disappear with a Yellow Dancer in his jaws. And Thierry? Oh, Thierry…

Having lost Lungberg so early in the morning’s session, I brooded as I watched another angler take fish after fish from the jetty side of the promontory that juts out into the lake. I set myself up on the south bank, just to the right of the jetty from where the angler was fishing. I asked him what he was using? Damsels, he replied, but I couldn’t get any interest from the fish in my Damsel imitations. When the angler vacated his spot at around midday, I asked - no, I begged - to see his killer fly. It turned out to be a run-of-the-mill Blue Flash Damsel, only with a tail that was half as long as the one I was using. He wished me luck and left.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been given custody of a ‘hot-spot’. However, once in my possession the ’hot-spot’ usually undergoes a reverse Midas-effect where what previously produced pure gold, now, in my hands, produces only shit. So it was with more than a hint of trepidation that I pinched the marabou tail of my Blue Flash Damsel together between the nails on my thumb and forefinger and shortened the tail to less than an inch. I took a deep breath and reassured myself that the guy before had caught twenty fish in less than three hours. I was now standing in the exact spot he was fishing in, with the exact same fly that he was fishing with. This was my moment of redemption. The moment my Uncatchables sequence ends.

I cast out to where I’d just seen a fish break the surface. The goldhead on the Damsel gave a resounding ‘plop’ as it hit the water. I tightened and a fish nailed my fly before I even had time to start the retrieve. This stops now. Thierry Henry is my game-changer, taking on Liverpool single-handed at Highbury to score a hat-trick and overturn a 2-1 deficit into a 4-2 stunning victory.

The fish screamed off across the lake. I was happy to let it run. Until I looked down and saw that my Snowbee Hi-Viz floating line was caught around the handle of my reel. The irresistible force met the immovable object with the only result possible: my leader snapped, Thierry bids me ‘au revoir' and Va Va Vooms off into the distance.

I experienced a rage I hadn’t felt since childhood. It was one of utter impotence in the face of such glaring injustice. It’s. Not. Fair. I curse. I swear. I shook my fist at the heavens. That’s it. Enough. Of all the ridiculous ways to lose a fish. I went to hurl my rod in the water. No more fishing for me. I’ve had enough.

For me this is my Uncatchables Van Nistleroy moment. Except this time after getting Viera sent off, the horse-faced cheat’s stoppage time penalty goes in off the underside of the cross bar and Manchester United win 1-0. No season-defining melee at the final whistle. No Invincibles. It’s over.

But something stopped me. To the Invincibles whether the penalty crashed off the bar or went in was irrelevant. It was how Arsenal reacted to the injustice that defined their season and ultimately their run of 49 unbeaten matches. They’d had enough of being bullied and booted around the pitch by United. Led by Martin Keown’s salmon-like leap which ended with him bringing his arms down on Van Nistleroy’s head, a group of Arsenal players surrounded the Dutch striker; pushing, punching, giving him verbals. More players joined in the fray from both sides, which continued down the pitch and into the tunnel. The reaction from the Arsenal players sent a clear message to United: we are not going to take it anymore.

Tying on a plain Goldhead Damsel, I send a similar message to the angling gods, the trout, the vengeful spirit of Colyn Bedale-Taylor, anyone who will listen and the next two hours produce my most memorable session as a fly fisherman.

The trout chase Damsel nymphs on either side of the promontory. My fly is either enveloped the second it hits the water or trout bow-wave after it as I strip it back just below the surface. I switch to a dry blue Damsel, which the regulars have told me works well here, and it’s smashed by fish after fish. It’s so damn simple that it becomes unsporting, especially on a catch and release lake like Mallard. Eager not to offend the angling gods again, I stop when I reach ten. But, oh my days, it’s hard to walk away when the fishing is this good.

So what caused my Uncatchables streak? A statistical anomaly? A dose of hubris from the angling gods?

In accepting the Director's Guild of America DW Griffith Award, Stanley Kubrick questioned as to whether the moral of Icarus’s story was the dangers of trying to flying too high or whether he should have built better wings.

Taking Kubrick’s advice, I sharpened hooks, retied flies and increased the strength of my leader after Campbell broke me off. Viera and Lungberg were simply bad fishing. Toure and Gilberto were just bad luck. Whereas Thierry couldn’t have been a bigger cartoon-like cliché of a disaster, if I’d followed it up by slipping on a banana skin, gone arse-over-tit into the water and regained consciousness with tweeting birds flying around my head.

As the trout I fish for tend to be under or around the 2.0lb mark my preferred rod is always a 5wt. However, with the low pressure dominated weather of the last two seasons in the South West and the resultant increase in wind speed, I’ve found myself having to fish with a 7wt with increasing frequency. My trip to Horton Lake was my first outing of the season for my Loop Opti 5WT. I tend to underplay smaller fish with the 7WT to prevent pulling the hook out of their mouths. Perhaps I’d made the error of not adjusting to the drop down in weight and played the fish too softly with the 5WT?

There’s also the issue of barbless/de-barbed hooks. Being a catch-and-release water means all hooks have to be de-barbed at Mallard and it was tempting to turn to this as the cause of losing so many fish. Although, a season of fishing the streams of the Avon and tributaries north of Bath with barbless hooks convinced me that they had no detrimental effect on my catch-rate.

Similar to a bowler’s strike rate, which is calculated by balls bowled divided wickets taken, the fishing equivalent would be fish hooked divided by the number of fish landed. Having fished at The Barrows for nine years where some sessions would consist of a single pull to show for all my efforts, I’d learnt the importance of converting those pulls into fish in the net. If I had to guess I’d say I’d catch four fish for every one lost.

After every flip of a coin, the odds always revert back to 50/50 as to whether it’s a heads or tails, so statistically, at least, it is possible for that coin to land ‘heads’ nine times in a row. With a conversion rate of 25% every fish I hook has a 1 in 4 chance of evading capture. Yet, for that 1 in 4 outcome to occur nine times in a row over four different fishing trips, was bordering on Twilight Zone territory.

But people still win the National Lottery (45 million to one), planes crash (11 million to one), people get eaten by sharks (3.7 million to one) and Leicester won the 2015/16 Premiership (a paltry 5,000 to one). Because, as we all know, despite seemingly insurmountable odds saying otherwise, shit does indeed happen.

And when it does? My advice is to tie on another fly and go full Martin Keown on it.